Networks of various companies and agencies have the potential to become integrated with a standardized fiber optic plant to promote efficient sharing and transmission of information. However, the array of different protocols used by different bodies hinders interconnectivity and management of data through a common fiber facility.
There is a current need for local and wide area telecommunications networks to connect Internet Protocol (IP) managed Network Elements (NEs) at customer premises with Synchronous Optical NETwork elements (SONET NEs), which are external to the customer premises network and provide a data transport mechanism. As shown in FIG. 1, a SONET NE network including OSI-DCC has the potential to transport data to and from the customer premises where IP NEs 51, 52 and 53 are used to provide the customer a specific interface or service (ISDN, HDLC). These IP NEs (51, 52 and 53) may need to be managed from an IP manager which is remote from the local customer premises. However, the interconnectivity of remotely located IP NEs, such as those represented by reference numerals 51 through 53, through an intermediate SONET NE 3 to the IP management device 1 has not been previously realized due to fundamental differences in the IP and OSI (used by SONET) protocol stacks.
For instance, the SONET NEs are managed from a central location via Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) applications running on an overhead management channel called the data channel communications (DCC). The customer premises NEs may, however, be IP NEs that are managed by IP applications such as a Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). Presently, there is no generic way to manage these remote IP NEs using SNMP through the existing SONET OSI-DCC.
Additionally, at the network layer, SONET runs the CLNP protocol while the IP NE runs the TCP/IP protocol. When a conventional SONET device encounters an IP packet, the SONET device CLNP layer will not be able to route the packet to the IP destination address.